In recent times, various electronic musical instruments have been developed which utilize advances made in electronic technology. Among these electronic musical instruments are electronic stringed instruments such as electronic violins, electronic guitars, and guitar synthesizers, as well as electronic keyboard instruments such as electronic pianos and electronic organs.
An electronic stringed instrument is usually played by designating a desired pitch with a finger, while picking strings with another finger, thereby producing a desired musical sound. Consequently, more advanced performance techniques are required on the part of the player than in the case of playing an electronic keyboard instrument. In particular, when playing a guitar, in order to quickly and reliably produce a number chords which occur frequently in a piece of music, a plurality of strings have to be picked while a corresponding number of strings are simultaneously held depressed. Since it is extremely difficult to master such advanced performance techniques by self-teaching, it is therefore necessary for the player to receive special training or personal teaching from a qualified teacher.
A musical instrument training device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. Specification No. 4,286,495. In this device, when a chord name, e.g., Am or C.sub.7, is designated by selectively operating a chord selection switch provided on a guitar body, one of a plurality of LEDs (light-emitting diodes) provided on respective fret positions on a fingerboard, i.e., a LED provided at fret positions corresponding to the designated chord name, is turned on to designate the fret positions at which strings are to be held depressed.
In this disclosed training device, however, only a fret position corresponding to a selectively operated chord selection switch is designated with the turning-on of the LED provided at the corresponding fret position. In other words, it is not possible to display the finger operating position, finger operating order, finger operating direction, etc. with the progress of music being played. Further, with regard to the training device noted above, no judgment is made on whether strings have been correctly depressed by the player at the position, at which LEDs corresponding to the chord name selected by a chord selection switch are indicated. This means that the device is inadequate as a means of training a player, since it does not check as to whether strings are correctly depressed at the position at which an LED is turned on.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open 54-161924 discloses an electronic stringed instrument, in which pitch data, corresponding to a fret position, at which strings are being depressed, is stored in advance, the stored pitch data being then read out and sounded for every picking of the strings. As a result, it is possible to sound musical notes of desired pitches at desired timings.
With this electronic stringed instrument, however, tone length data is not stored in addition to the tone pitch data. More particularly, when an actual performance is made, the performance content is not stored in real time. Consequently, it is not possible to reproduce the performance content in the same manner in which it was played. This means that it is not possible to improve the playing techniques by finding mistakes in the playing for instructional purposes while reproducing the stored performance. Further, with this electronic stringed instrument, navigation display is not made on the basis of the stored pitch data. Therefore, training of playing techniques can not be made with this stringed instrument.